Good bye, Edicy!

Edicy has come to an end and this is great news for everybody. No more old designs and out-of-date tools — welcome updated and powerful, a successor, Voog. Actually, Voog has been around since July 2014, so you can rest assured knowing that you now join hundreds of thousands other happy users.

If you were using Edicy until recently, this is a great chance for you to upgrade your website design for free and experience the essence of drag-and-drop based website building.

In case you were using the Edicy Free platform, you can now upgrade to any Voog paid plan with a special discount. You have until 1st of September to activate your subscription.

What is Voog?

It's a tool for creatives to build beautiful, design-driven websites for themselves and their customers. Voog is user centric — it's light-weight, simple to use and takes care of all the tech side so that both the end-user and the agency are free of setup, configuration, updating, security, scalability and hosting issues.

To give you a bit of a backstory — we've been both building websites, branding companies and developing online publishing tools for the past decade and a half. Voog is the quintessence of our experience.

What sets Voog apart from competition?

First — it's the best tool out there for creating multilingual websites. In Europe you just can't get around the languages, every website serves a market with at least 2-3 spoken languages.

Thirdly, our drag-and-drop based store feature is one of a kind. Voog store platform stands out of the crowd by a few significant characteristics:

Easy to start. You can start selling your products — or receiving donations or whatever your e-commerce goal is — after just a few minutes of setup. Or you can dive deep and build a nuanced store with thousands of items on sale.

Payment processing. Voog can be integrated with a variety of payment methods and providers. PayPal, credit card processors, online banking. As a bonus we support offline payments too.

Global shipping. Set up shipping by offering differently priced delivery methods (e.g. expedited vs standard) and differently priced regions. Or if you want, just sell locally. Or sell digital goods with no shipping at all.

Full order management. Send automatic invoices / payment receipts to buyers. Get notification for each sale. List orders sorted by payment and fulfilment status.

In conclusion

These are just few examples of the many possibilities that you can create with Voog. Therefore, we hope that you will use it to its full capabilites and enjoy the experience while you're at it!

We are open to your ideas and questions if you have any — just email us at hello@voog.com.

The big news of this summer was that Edicy will become Voog, a vastly updated and improved successor of the current version. Many of you have already switched, others will follow suit in the autumn — after we've polished the user experience and brought Voog out of beta.

Another important announcement is that we've switched to a faster and more reliable network service provider. Therefore we've also had to change the IP-addresses of our servers. Think of them as the postal codes of the server world.

We've changed everything below Edicy — the servers are new and more powerful, the system architecture on them is more optimized and there are more people taking care of the tech stuff — and your peace of mind. As the next and final step of this transistion, you'll soon be switched to Voog, the new version of Edicy.

Those of you who have imported (pointed) an external domain name to your website on Edicy, have to point it to the new IP-address: 85.222.234.11. The change has to be made at your nameservice provider or domain name registrar.

Old settings will cease to work sometime after 01. December 2014, so please make the change before this date. If you do not know where you can change your domain settings, please contact support@edicy.com and we'll sort it out.

Edicy is suitable for everyone – whether it's a small business, big multinational enterprise, NGO or even a state agency. Once an organisation has found Edicy to fit its needs, it's not that rare that one goes for more than one website. And this is exactly what Leinonen Group did.

Today, Leinonen has 12 websites running on Edicy. To find out how did they find and what made them to choose Edicy, we contacted Leinonen Marketing Manager Mika Pyhamaki.

Leinonen group – Obviously Finnish brand. Yet what it is that your company does?

Yes, we are a fully family owned Finnish company. We provide professional accounting and business advisory services in the Baltic states, Nordic Countries, Russia, and Central Europe. We help companies enter and succeed in new international markets.

The Leinonen Group Headquarters is in Tallinn, Estonia, and our presence in the Baltics is strong after operating here for over 20 years.

Reason you started to look for a new website?

Our main target group are international companies that operate in our service region. Digital marketing is the most effective way to reach prospects across the borders. Website is often the first contact point for our company, and thus in the core of our digital communications. We simply wanted to make sure it is fresh and up-to-date.

We also wanted to move closer to our markets and give freedom for individual offices to manage their marketing and communications. Instead of one website translated to many languages, we wanted to have a new Group level website and several country level websites.

What where the key requirements towards designers while starting off with the development of your new site?

Well, we wanted to work with a professional service provider who can deliver a credible and fresh solution and is easy to communicate with. Designers' previous works always reveal the capabilities and unique style.

We wanted the website builder (or — content management system or CMS for short) to be as easy to use as possible. In addition it needed to cover all the technical requirements related to different content formats, mobile usage, and SEO.

Where there any hesitations when your design bureau Fraktal offered Edicy as a CMS for your new site - relatively unknown tool next to giants like WordPress, Joomla, Squerspace etc.

After scanning 6-7 service providers and the most common CMS systems from Estonia and Finland, it just became clear that Fraktal and Edicy provided the best solution for us.

We thought that the big content management systems are too big and complicated to use. We would rather concentrate on good content than technical work.

Tajo Oja (Fraktal) made the web design for us, and Rait Parts (Edicy) trained us to use it. Thanks to them everything looks cool and works very well now! We took Edicy in to use in Autumn 2012 and launched the new website in February 2013.

What where the first impressions while being introduced to your new site and tool to manage it all? Most difficult and the most joyful moments?

Already the first design from Fraktal was impressive. All Leinonen management was surprised by the change.

However, the most difficult part was creating the structure for the sites and to create all the content needed. This was an internal job and took a lot of time.

My personal highlight was the moment when all the 12 webpages were finally up and running with the new content. It was like washing the company's face with a super soap.

Your company has branches all over Europe. Meaning that your clients and team speak over 10 different languages. Does Edicy cope with that?

No problems. All the relevant languages are available. Each of our country decides about their languages and translating the page structure is easy in Edicy.

You have lived with your new site and Edicy for more than a year now. What are your comments? Willing to recommend it to others?

I am very satisfied with the results and cooperation. The price quality ratio is excellent in Edicy.

I would recommend Edicy especially for small and medium sized companies and corporations.

Edicy allows multiple users. It is easy and fun to use. Also, the Edicy team seems committed, helpful and technically capable to find solutions to customer needs.

Back in the day, .com address was the only 'proper' domain name for a decent global brand. It was seconded by some two-hundred local flavors like .de for Germany or .com.au for Australia — used by both national legs of global brands and ordinary local businesses.

What if you were a small web-oriented company, like Edicy, with just a dozen people in the team and paying customers in more than 100 countries? Such companies usually look for a .com address, as there are just too many local domain names. It would be too expensive and difficult to reckon with specific registration limitations.

The odds are you won't find a suitable .com name when starting with a new business. With more than 100 million .com domains registered, there's just nothing to choose from anymore. Your name is long gone and by now there aren't many good derivatives or two-word combinations either. Feel the frustration? You are not alone. Every new business, every ngo, every company going through rebranding face the same frustration. Tens of thousands of people every day.

Such a scarcity has of course led to the emergence of a massive new market. For starters, most of those 100M+ .com names are not in active use. Vast majority never quite were. They were (and are still being) registered in a the initial dot com gold rush. Just open Sedo.com where you can choose from millions of .com names, price tags starting with 50 bucks and going up to tens of millions of dollars. Or go to Namestation which helps you either combine a smart new .com name from language engine or crowdsource this task from its community.

Neither of those options are helpful for most of the naming cases. There can only be one johndoe.com, just a single .com for any unique brand name that you sometimes can't flavor with additional words. So, three additional trends are reshaping the .com world for already a few years now.

First came the mindshift. Dot com wasn't always considered the only true god at some point anymore. Hip startups went on and established themselves on alternative domain name endings like del.icio.us or instagr.am. Thousands of them turned for .io names. United States, America and British Indian Ocean Territory? Not anymore. These once-local domain name endings started to live their own lives as part of the global branding village. It It soon led to common companies embracing originally Columbian .co — like a lean, fresh, more powerful version of .com.

Second came the discovery that world is bigger than United States. Dot com always had this American flavor to it. Couple it with the original strict English-language character set limitations (e.g no ç, õ or 人 allowed in the names) and you have a problem of enormous size — a problem for more than 6 billion non-English speakers. If you want to distinguish yourself culturally or language-wise from the US-centricity, you've felt this problem. So IDN, International Domain Names were rolled out to solve it. Well, IDN didn't quite go mainstream in the end. Istead, it became a potential goldmine for scammers (çomcasť.com anyone?) and jokers (☃.net). Additional rules are now in place to prevent the registration of scammy 'exotic' domain names.

Third change was the complete messing up of the already-eroding domain name landscape. Not only did we see opening of the universal character set and a few non-latin domain name endings, now you can register your own domain name ending if you are rich enough. johndoephotography.com gets competition from johndoe.photography, edicy.com might one day get coupled with com.edicy. Get crazy...

The new internet gold rush is as crazy as the Bitcoin hysteria, just lower profile. No one knows where it ends and how much money will be burned looking for gold in this sand. Until the domain name ocean calms down, all we know is that .com is still the king — instagr.am turned into instagram.com and del.icio.us became delicious.com. And last but not least, Apple is still apple.com not .apple*. I suggest being as cautious and reasonably conservative with the new magical domain-name trends as with every other hype or gold rush.

* On s PC you will see Windows logo here, on a Macs and iPhones you'll see Apple's.

We love to make things simple and easy to use. Taking another step towards it last year, we joined our forces with Veebimajutus.ee, one of the biggest hosting companies in Estonia who offers domains and e-mail service. And after half a year, we can say that we did right – hundreds of new users have found Edicy through Veebimajutus.ee.

To find out how things have turned out for Veebimajutus, we had a little chat with Veebimajutus board member Margus Merilai.

Veebimajutus.ee is one of the leaders in Estonian hosting market and mainly focus on domains. How did you then end up offering websites?

Veebimajutus.ee is not the leader of Estonian market, but we did become the second largest domain provider this year. We’ve been offering websites for a couple of years actually and it started from our clients’ needs for simple and free websites.

We were interested in Edicy since we were looking for a new alternative to our already existing software. The new solution had to be modern, up to date and easy to use.

There are tons of website building services and softwares – Wordpress, Joomla, Squarespace – to name some. Why did you go with Edicy?

Actually the client makes the final choice. Anyone who prefers Wordpress, can get it as easily as Edicy.

By large, our users can be divided into two: those with some knowledge of IT and looking to dig deeper into the website choose Wordpress; others who wish to create a nice website with little effort go with Edicy.

How did the integration of Edicy went? What were the steps that turned out to be most complicated ones?

Integrating over API went without any issues, nor did we have any complications. Still, some trade-offs had to be made, but it is understood when talking about a ready-made software.

Your clients can see Edicy logo and branding – something that many resellers wish to avoid. Do you find it not important or is the branding even beneficial?

I can’t really speak for others, but we don’t try to hide Edicy’s brand and believe it has rather been good for us. You don’t have to everything yourself and a good collaboration helps both partners.

How much time and effort does Edicy take on daily basis?

We’ve made everything fully-automatic. This means that our “Make-a-web-yourself” service including Edicy, hosting and e-mail service, doesn’t take more effort than other hosting services we offer.

Has Edicy been the one you were looking for?

Yes, we are happy in any possible way. Of course there is always room for improving our cooperation and I’m sure we’ll do that :)

Veebimajutus.ee has been offering Edicy for 6 months now. Would you recommend it to others as well? What should a good reseller keep in mind?

If one is looking for a simple website building alternative for clients or partners, then Edicy is definitely a good choice.

Although users can take Edicy over API as well, then hosting companies should bear in mind that Edicy is not an open-source service and therefore compromises might have to be made for some aspects.

Choosing a website design can be a handful, just like designing your living room. First, you need an idea. Then you need to figure out the details. Then mix them together. And unless you are a design pro, you'll never know what will actually come out in the end.

Luckily, Edicy is a perfect tool for everyone – one can choose a ready-made template or create a unique design with our developer tools.

Let's see what are the design possibilities with Edicy.

Ready-made design template

You can choose a template from our collection of diligently crafted designs. Add pages, fill them with content and your initial website is ready. Our templates cover different styles and colours so you should be able to find the one you fancy.

Customizing the template

"But I want to change the background colour!" No biggie. You can ask us to make minor changes on your website template — free of charge! Just contact our support team and we'll sort it out for you.

Unique design

In case there are too many things to be changed or your ideas are so complex that solving them requires designers to get involved we'll help you get a quote from one of our design partners. Our partners have built hundreds of unique and nifty sites with Edicy. Why not get one yourself? Although you can of course contact our partners directly, we are more than happy to hear your ideas and help you to find the best partner for your needs. Again – just drop a line to our support and we'll get things going.

The best strategy is to go step by step. First, start off by picking one of the templates, get help from us when the content is set and switch to custom design when the initial site becomes too constraining. Your design can grow along your business and fit your changing needs.

Our ecosystem has expanded significantly over the last couple of years. Thousands of exceptional custom websites have been built on Edicy. Most of them are crafted by our partners and freelancers from around the world.

One of the most requested features by a swarm of web developers has been the ability to alter the looks and components of individual pages and blog posts. For example to give each blog post a unique thumbnail or cover image. Or apply a different background image for any of the pages on a site.

Today we are happy to announce that this major update — custom data fields — has been released and available on all paid accounts. You can now bind any kind of data not only to entire site but also for each page or blog post separately.

Let's say you want to set a different background picture for each of your page. Before you had to create a new layout for every page to make it happen — or use extensive JavaScript. Now you can just set up a drop area for the background image in the template for the website owner. In addition, you can call it out anywhere on your website with a unique id. This way you can set a background picture for your article and display it also on your front page as a thumbnail or cover image. A perfect solution for photo blogs.

The scope of possibilities is huge — unique background colors, Facebook post images and other OG-tags, text attributes, icons for menu items, configurable widgets like distance / price / tax calculators or Flickr galleries, page layout modulators etc. Go ahead, read our renewed APIfor more or jump straight to the examples. Feel free to contact us via support@edicy.com. We'd be really happy to help you get new flexible customer websites up and running.

You don't need to hire a designer for every design task — just like you don't have to call your copywriter when writing everyday emails.

Understanding design and being able to apply it at the basic level doesn't require you to have talent or have formal design education. It's a lot easier than learning French and it pays off handsomely — just like being able to read and write. This is rather important to remember — don't be afraid, design is not for designers only.

In web, design helps the visitors to use, read and understand the content of your website. A website with great design takes the effort away from the visitor. It's easy to navigate, find info, reach answers and become your customer.

I'm going to give you a few simple rules that help you apply basic design in your work with content. These rules also help you be a better partner for designers when hiring them for a design job.

Layout

Simple layout. Humans are pretty bad computers. Don't try to make them think, instead adapt your design to their simple, linear abilities. Simple, geometrical and consistent — that's what a layout should be. Use as few differently designed elements at a time (at once on screen) as you can. Keep the navigation consistent across the site. Use grid-based layout to present content in a neat and harmonious way.

Readability. It's difficult to read long lines of text. That's why all newspapers give you multiple short columns instead of one wide. In web, columns aren't so nicely implemented technically and are a bit counterintuitive — we are happy to keep scrolling a single column. But the lines of text in this column should still be optimally just 60 characters wide. A bit more is a good compromise — as we can't have multiple columns in web. This blog is for example 80 chars wide. Another important factor of readability is character size. It should be bigger than you think. It's now basically accepted that a standard body text in web should be 16px — more than what you are reading right now.

Whitespace. Rookie designers try to fill up every corner of the canvas with some information. Such cluttering is both very hard to "read" and looks unmistakenly cheap. Embrace emptiness. Empty space — whitespace — gives the content it surrounds a lot of value, a lot of attention.

Responsiveness. Until recently, websites were designed for a single usecase — for viweing them on desktop/laptop screens. Since then, most of us have adopted smartphones and are browsing the web from a variety of tiny screens. Moreover, instead of mouses clicking, clumsy fingers are tapping the links and buttons. Therefore designs must be flexible and fitting — responsive — on all kinds of devices.

Content

Writing.Copy is the most undervalued part of design. Design is about usability, understanding. The easiest way to spread understanding is through explaining it with precise, short and sufficient words. True — every customer has specific needs and they use different sentencing when searching the web and might not find you if your site doesn't include those wordings. So you should cover a variety of different words to attract those searches. The solution is to keep the main pages short, simple, precise flavored with your branding and style. But the blog and some lower level pages should be abundant with words attracting the long tail of searches and interests to your website.

Short paragraphs. People don't read websites. They scan, trying to find relevance or interest quickly. They tend to read headlines rather than body texts and quotes rather than paragraphs. Structured texts are therefore more likely serving their purpose to get read — or scanned through. Break long texts down to shorter subsections. It also looks nicer, more worked through to the human mind.

Pictures. Videos. A picture is worth a thousand words. Video — ten thousand! Illustrate long texts with visuals. Use pictograms (icons) beside headings to speed up communication and improve understanding. Good enough pictures are easy to make if you just learn a few photography basics too.

Aesthetics

Minimalism. Most of what I said above was about being as simple as possible. It's both about making the design task solvable and reaching a nice contemporary result. Simplicity isn't dull. Human mind associates order and simplicity with beauty. Minimalist scandinavian design is beautiful. Don't experiment unless you get paid for finding your own unique style as a designer.

Colors. Some colors match, some don't. You don't have to guess, it's pure mathematics unless you are a superstar designer who can basically match anything (because he can). Just go and pick colors yourself for your website theme.

Typography. You don't have to stick to 5 fonts of the olden times in web anymore. There are hundreds of free and not so free webfonts. But don't 'get crazy'. Unless you know you are good enough in typography, stick to the Arial-like sans fonts or Times-resembling serif fonts. Comic sans and other 'funny' fonts should be left to professional use :) Oh, and be sure that the font you choose supports the languages you intend to use on your site. Not every font has cyrillic or even East European characters included.

Be honest. Avoid cheese. Being honest is priceless. Instead on illustrating the team section on the website with a stock photo of smiling people of every gender and nationality, use pics of your own team. Never use stock images of shaking hands and suits of cheesy businesspeople. Show your real customers, real workplace, real products.

Snipcart's shopping cart is a perfect tool if you are looking to build your e-store with Edicy product catalogue. And to make it even better, Snipcart's team took their time to really work it through and share their Edicy experience with others.

The simplicity of Edicy does not only rely on the everyday usability, but also on the fact that we are offering a one-stop-shop for running a site – hosting, content and domain management, code editor with a knowledge base for more technical people, as well as a super friendly helpdesk.

And we've been rewarded a thousand times for our work – each day sees more and more tailor-made sites built on Edicy, pleasing on the eye, helping people in their daily life while offering and finding different services.

omaasi.com / youroffice.ee – these two sites created by Velvet Digital Paper have been out there for more than a year. Both of them use a similar one page layout onto which a blog and product list has been built using our catalogue tool. Both of the sites are also optimized to look good on mobile devices – a feature common to most Edicy sites unless deliberately built differently.

tallinnbicykleweek.ee / minuunistustepaev.ee – a revolution in the streets and evolutionary changes in mindset. Edicy has the honor of hosting sites of a number of NGOs who not only care about the people and physical environment around them but have transformed this knowledge into beautiful and functional websites. With the help of designers of course. Two of them, Tallinn Bicykle Week and "Day of my dreams" are combining photos and simple messages to interact with their viewer – a smart move since photos of actual people and events are powerful means of telling a story. Especially when speaking about web – long texts belong to books printed on paper.

filmmusic.ee / tab.ee / lightbiennale.ee – sites for different festivals and events, promoting Estonian composers, architectural heritage and the magical work of light designers. All of these sites originate from dudes at aku.co. These sites create a good showcase of what can be done with our catalogue tool – events, authors and publications can be filtered by name, event title or other characteristics to create a holistic overview for the visitor. The coding of these three sites has been done by Fraktal.co and Newtime.